


The Death of Charles Williams

by Roswellian



Category: Chronicles of the Imaginarium Geographica - James A. Owen
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Chracter Study, M/M, Mourning, Multi, Old Age, Secrets
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-07
Updated: 2015-09-07
Packaged: 2018-04-19 13:05:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,743
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4747511
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Roswellian/pseuds/Roswellian
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>No, anyone who thought that seeing Charles pass out of this world was not a surprise had not known the man.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Death of Charles Williams

**Author's Note:**

> This is not exactly canon. I messed with some dates, and ages Susan Copper up by a couple of years to make her timeline fit.

When they tell John that they are sorry for his loss, he nods sullenly. His mouth twitching as he looks down. He can’t tell if the thing beating in his chest, trying to get out, is laughter or tears. 

“Charles, was nearly sixty,’ one says, “it can’t have been much of a surprise.” 

Now that, that is something to laugh at. They forget, or perhaps, they had never known that Charles was always the youngest of them. They had not seen Charles, age thirty-one, lighting the keep on fire, had not seen the wildness in his eyes as he had struck the match.They had not seen Charles, newly forty, shirtless and laughing as he climbed the top sail, had not seen him squirming under the Cartographers pen, had not seen the tattooed islands trace their dance upon his back. 

Had not touched those lines themselves. Or felt vitality pulsing in his veins. Or held him and felt the wild thrumming of his heart. There was a reason after all that the animals called him kin, he had a birds heart if not Jack’s wolfish hunger. 

Perhaps somewhere along the way they had confused erudite tendencies for age. Or perhaps in some classroom they had come to think that years lived was equitable with age, a common misconception. 

No, anyone who thought that seeing Charles pass out of this world was not a surprise had not known the man. 

….

After the funeral, John goes for a walk out across the hills that are slowly disappearing consumed by villages and towns and by the war effort. He rambles along and thinks about all the times he has been lost before. He is not lost now. He has a map he made as practice in his pocket. It’s annotated in ancient greek with a key in old english and notes in a particularly obscure dialect of sanskrit. 

His students laugh at him and say, “You’re the only man we know who has conversational ancient greek as a class requirement.” 

“But you never know when you will need it,” he says laughing, playing the jolly old professor, a role he finds less ill fitting every year. 

“We’re never going to need it,” His students groan.

“Well,” he says. They catch the twinkle in his eyes and know they have asked for trouble. “For instance you might need it now.” Form there it is a story, told in ancient greek, about how he and Jack, called Professor Lewis in the class room, met some greeks in London and managed to get into a story telling contest with them, recounting the tale of Jack the Giant Killer and such like. They had won by reciting pieces of the Iliad in their original form. That had won them some respect and friendship. 

It’s not technically a true story, but it’s truer than saying there would never be a use for ancient greek again. Least not in this world. Yet, they would not believe the truth so John feeds them fictionalizations and tries not to feel guilty. 

Those who can keep up laugh at all the right parts, and those who cannot parse his words giggle nervously in sympathy or self preservation. At the end one asks, “Were the greeks pretty, professor?” Assuming they were young woman, and the contest a roundabout way of flirting, as most young college boys are wont to do. 

John pauses. He thinks about Jack and Chaz, who was not Charles but could have been in another life, standing under a young Mediterranean sun. He thinks about how the dusk had touched Jack’s eyelashes and how it had thrown Chaz’s burn scars into sharp relief. He thinks about what it was like to stand with them between the columns of a long dead place. “Yes,” he sighs, “they were very pretty.” 

….

Jack meets him under the lamp post. His hands in his pocket, pose relaxed, but with his normal cocky grin notably absent. 

“Florence left for London almost as soon as you left,” he says to John. 

None of them know Charles’s wife very well but they still feel guilty for stealing him away, for taking him away to other lands. John felt bad for his own wife too but she had not suffered quite like Florence. Perhaps it was because Floence, unlike Edith, had married Charles with out knowing he was a wanderer. She had had to watch her neat professor spouse, a man she thought she knew, become a lean and tanned adventurer. 

Or perhaps it was easier on Edith because she had married a soldier who already had bad dreams. John had cried on their wedding night, the trench fever dreams showing him his dead comrades again and again. When Charles returned from that first adventure he had dreamed of Nemo’s death and wendigo every night. She found her practical Charles beset by demons she could do nothing about.  

“We’ll go visit her next week when classes let out,” John says, “we’ll visit the Barries too. They’ve doubtless heard.”

“I offered to let her stay with us,” Jack says meaning he offered to let her stay with John. 

“She would never leave London.” When war broke out Charles had reluctantly come to Oxford, but Florence would not join them. Charles had written her letters everyday, never disloyal, even as John leaned over his writing desk and stole a kiss from him. 

“We could tell her the truth.” Say Jack not looking at John. 

“She’d never believe us.”

“We could take her through the wardrobe. We could call Bert. We could show her.” He nearly yells. The leaves shake. Jack shakes.

“Jack,” John sighs. He touches his friend, lover, cohort on the shoulder. “He has lied to her for years, she can’t know now. And anyway, she wouldn’t have wanted this for him.” 

“What, death?” Jack sneers. “it comes for us all in time.” The saying, conceived to be a comfort, sounds like poison in his mouth.

“No,” John says, softly, his breath congealing into clouds in the evening air, “she wouldn’t have wanted to know the fate he got. She would not have wished him to be like us. Remember that first day aboard the Indigo Dragon, when he was so reluctant to believe. I think… I think she would have rather him stayed that way, bolted to the earth, safe from horrors. I think she would think it kinder.” 

“But he was the most fanciful of all of us!” Jack yells, anger still pounding off of him, but more like summer heat now than fire. He has not been that angry young man without a shadow for a very long time. 

And what he says is true. Charles lives in a world where badgers run printing companies and can be scholars and where islands move and so do the maps of them and where Peter Pan still exists and never grows old. Not that John and Jack do not inhabit that world too, but they are not of it, do not love it, in the way that Charles does. He gave his life for it, after all.

He gave his life for it twice. Once in the forum of Chaz and once in his own right. 

…

The next evening meeting of the Inklings is a sober one, though all of them are very drunk. The Bird and Baby is near empty except for the Inklings, regulars and irregulars a like, come from their various corners of scholarship to drink and mourn together. But even with every member of their informal club present, a thing that has not happened in year and years, perhaps had never happened at all, it still feels incomplete. 

There is a space within them. A chair between John and Jack, a space at the bar, a hole in the fabric of their conversation. Everyone skirts it neatly; afraid that if they step into it that they will fall away too, disappear as thoroughly as Charles. Or worse, they will erase his memory and confirm for them that he is really gone away.

“No more pints with Charles,” moans Warnie, head in his hands. 

“No more wraps on the head for bing silly,” cries Barfield, looking for a laugh and getting a lat hearted one. 

“No more animal stories,” says Adam Fox into his ale, “how are we ever going to get updates on Tumaler the badger and his grandson Fred now.” 

“Well,” says John clapping Adam on the back, “I happen to know what comes next.” 

“Yes, man,” says jack, “He just happened to tell us of the next entrapment.” 

“Fred studies to become a scholar,” adds John. 

“A badger scholar? That is ripe,” Dyson says form a bar stool, “and very Charles. If a badger wanted to learn philosophy he’d have sat him down in class and damn well taught him.” 

John and Jack look at each other and imagine how happy Fred had been when Charles had taken him as apprentice. “You have no idea how right you are,” Jack tells Dyson and his chest feels little less tight. 

.…

After the best known secret society in Oxford disbanded for the night, scholars and authors pouring into the rain soaked street, the most exclusive secret society in Oxford met. Once they had been three, now they were two.

These meeting more frequent than the weekly inkling meetings and they always took place after dark. John’s study at the university, his home away from home, was their refuge. They sat on his long low sofa their legs tangled together and talked. Sometime it was about the wars, ones everyday people remembered and the ones that only they did. Sometimes it was about language or about their mutual acquaintances. Sometimes it was about what would happen after they die. 

There will be caretakers after them. When John had opened the door to the future he had seen that. There would be a young man, born of the dessert. He would hate sailing on the dragons, preferring to make doors like the wardrobe and step through them. There would be a painter with delicate hands and a mind for horrors. He would paint the things he saw and then leave them, stuck oil on canvas, about the real world for people to gawp at. And there would be a woman who lives on a moor and ties her silver hair back with twine. She would come to it late and by the time her apprentice will be trained she’ll already be ancient. She will be a witch for a new age. 

He new nothing more of them other than what the door has shown him. Those three in detail and the shadows of others. They has each at one point feared that they would be the last caretaker, that after them there would be nothing left to protect. But that fear at least was gone away. 

“We will have to get a new apprentice,” says Jack. His finger traces tiny circles on John’s palm. “Fred and Hugo shall do good work, but they are getting old,” he says. his voice shows age in a way it never has before.

“Just like us,” John laughs. Jack laughs too. It is a funny joke that they should grow old together. That they should be offered that chance, but a cruel irony that it should be without Charles. Jack leans forward nestles his head into the crook John’s shoulder. They feel so utterly alone now, just to two of them alone. The last two men in this world who know of the other world.

“I like that Asimov fellow, or perhaps Bradbury,” says Jack, his voice muffled by John’s collar. 

“What about Cooper,” John says, “you said you liked her story the best.” 

“She’s too young.” Jack breaths, barley more than an exhalation. 

“Only a year younger than you were,” John whispers back equally as quiet . 

Jacks hands clench in johns shirt, his knuckles white in the dimness of their room. He shakes. He is 47 now, a different man than that boy who considered treachery all those years ago. Yet he will always consider himself his own prototype Edmund Pevensie. Alway fear the possibilities of what if. He still curses him self each night for the young man he once was. 

“She’s too young!” He shouts his voice rough and raw. There is no Charles anymore to hold Jack close and admonish him for his self hate. Only John who has never been good at these things. Jack is a language he can read but not speak, even for all his practice spouting off in Ancient Greek or negotiating trades in Sumatran and Elvish. 

“Well then we will train her,” John says, “we train her to be prepared like we never were.” 

And Jack looks up and says “Okay.” 

….

“You miss him,” Edith says, some time later, rather bluntly. 

“He was my closest friend besides Jack,” says John, hoping that that will be enough for her. 

“Yet before he moved to oxford you hardly ever saw him,” she says. John, who knows when his wife is planting traps for him, stays silent.

She places her hand on his face. “You have been different without him. Sadder. Your wrinkles are deeper this year than ever before.” She cups his cheek gently. The pads of his fingers become conveyors of current between them. He can feel it between them in their shared moment of quiet repose just as he can feel the morning light trickling between them, trough them, over them. 

“You loved him.” She states. He jerks a little under her hand. “I am not a fool.  I know what he means to you, meant to you, and if I didn’t before then this past year, without hm, would have made it clear.” 

“I just…” John says searching for an explanation, an excuse, an apology but finding nothing. He knows she is feeling his hot blush of shame beneath her fingers. He cannot look away. Edith has chosen he weapon well, a caress turned ammunition. 

“What I want to know is this; when did you love him? Did you marry me knowing that you loved him? And Jack then too?” 

“It wasn’t… It wasn’t till after I married you,” he sighs, conceding, “It was when I disappeared for a week in ’17. After Professor Sigurdsson died.” 

“You were holed up with him? and Jack?” She sounds almost disgusted, but not quite, like she can’t quite believe that he wouldn’t return home in the wake of his mentors death. Like she thinks he choose them over her. 

“I wasn’t like that.”  John breathes. Half truths were better than no truths. “The Professor, he was part of an organization. I didn’t know it at the time, but,” he breathes again, sorting out his story, “he was training me to be a sort of codebreaker. He was murdered Edith. And Charles Jack and I got tangled up in it all. We had to handle things after he died, to clean up that mess. Edith, I really didn’t mean to…” 

“Fall in love with them,” she finished for him, with only a hint of bitterness. 

“We thought we were going to die, all hope was lost. Charles and Jack they were braver than me, they did what was needed to be done. And seeing them like that covered in blood and muck, going through what we did. I never meant to be unfaithful. God, I’m sorry.” 

“Well,” she says, removing her hand from his face, finally, “that does explain quite a lot. Thank you for telling me after all this time. Just please don’t go falling in love with anyone else.”

He nearly chokes on his tears and his laughter and his relief at making her understand with out breaking his vows of secrecy. “I don’t think that will happen.” 

…..

They grow old. Johns joints ache in the morning and he creaks like a ship as he lowers himself into bed. Jacks hair falls out and he can’t move like he used to. They miss Charles, sometimes together, sometimes in their own bits of privacy. They write, they teach, and the students grow younger every year. 

Time passes. 

…..

Susan Cooper comes to Oxford. She is nothing like John and Jack might have imagined. They have tutored her though letters for 4 years and still she is a surprise to them. Her hair is cropped short and she wears wide legged men’s trousers and her Cornwall accent is thicker than any Cornwall accent they had heard before. In short, she was much more striking than they had thought she might be from her neat letters. 

They have asked her to to visit them at John’s rooms at the college, despite the fact that he spend more times in his garden than his office these days. 

“What is it that you to have thought not to show me?” She says as soon as she walks in. Her eyes twinkle, she knows what she is doing. Skipping pleasantries, and shocking them with her directness. 

“All the myths and legends you know are real,” John says before he can loose his nerve. She goes very, very still. Every muscles in her body looks like it is going to break. John worries that she is about to walk out the door. There is something inside her, bright and burning, pushing through her skin. John had long ago been shaken off any misconception that women were weaker than men. But still, sitting there he thinks, that whoever had made decided that women weren’t scary certainly hadn’t seen a twenty two year old who glowed. 

“Oh,” she says at last, “is that all?” Then she laughs. It’s not a pretty laugh it is more like a cackle. 

“The languages they are for talking to myths and legends, then?” She raises her eyebrow 

“Got it in one,” says Jack.  

….

John and Jack call up The Indigo Dragon and taker her out into the sea. Cooper stands in the riggings and looks out over the sea far below. She laughs and swings. In repose she is elegant, but in motion she draws their eyes far more. They, John and Jack, watch her falling in love with the open air. 

“She reminds me of me,’ says Jack. 

“There are less ships to do battle with now though,” says John. Jack makes a point of looking offended, but he doesn’t remove his hand from John’s. They go  silent and, quite immediately, back to the notable pastime of feeling old. She is very, very young, after all.

“Land!” Cooper yells sometime later. She struggles to be heard over the crashing of the sea.“Is this the Archipelago of dreams?” 

“No,” answers Jack, equally loud, “this is Avalon.”

“Arthur’s Land?” she says.

“Some time ago…” says John. 

“…now it’s just a rock full of ruins…,” says Jack. 

“…but sometimes it is not what there is to protect that is important…” says John. 

“…but instead, the fact that there is someone there to do the protecting,”Jack finishes it off with a grin. 

“Like me?” asks Susan, “I am a caretaker correct?”

 “Yes, like you.” 

….

The old ruins of Avalon have grown into hills. Only the tops of what used to be columns break the grassy sea. It is remarkable that it has grown so ancient with in the span of John and Jacks memories. When they first saw it some 45 years before it sad still had some semblance of passed grandeur, now it was only the shadow of the shadow of what Avalon once was. In this way, freed from the ruins turned gravestones, it was far more beautiful. 

On the top of the last and greatest hill sat an old knight, his armor mottled green. He had sat for so long that, it appeared to Susan, that a tree had grown through him. He spouted leaves now. “Is he alive?” she asks hesitantly. 

The three of them walk a little closer, and the knight looks up slowly. His neck creaks. Susan who had taken dragon boats, elvish, and ceaseless storms in stride, let out a tiny gasp. The old Knight is made of wood. His lined and creased face is soft birch and willow bark, the hard lines of his nose and brow ridges were oak. 

“Old friends,” The Knight says. His voice is the susurrus of wind through leaves and the creaking of branches in a storm.  

“How has your vigil been, old man?” Jack says. 

“I am a tree,” laughs the knight, “I will age gracefully, but you you seem to have lost most of your hair since last time I saw you.”

“Susan, this is The Green Knight of Avalon,” John says, remembering himself, “Charles, this is Susan Cooper.”

“Ah, so you are the new me?” Charles says peering through his visor at her. His eyes crinkle at the corners, old laugh lines translated into woodgrain. 

“You were a caretaker once?” says Susan.

“Once, long ago, in another life,” He sighs, “I have been but a Knight for years, and shall be from now till the end of my life.” 

Susan looks at him through her hard glinting eyes. They look like little bits of sea stone set into her smooth ageless face. She reaches out to shake Charles hands and marvels for a moment when he offers her his hand. He nails scrabble at the rough bark of his palm. “I was told there would be witches.” 

“Just over that hill,” says Charles.

Susan turn away and they all watch as she disappears over the mound and into the storm stained blue of the horizon beyond. They all agree later that she is very striking, perhaps far to striking to be a caretaker. The position perviously had only been held by scholarly men not quite suited to their adventuring life style, discounting of course Shelly, but she was a different matter entirely. 

“She’s going to give them a run for their money,” say John. 

“She’s a witch already,” says Jack. 

“Jolly good choice in my replacement fellows,” say Charles. 

“She’s not…” starts Jack, before closing his mouth, “well, we did our best. 

“Will you be staying?” says Charles, his voice hopeful despite himself. 

John looks away at where Susan Cooper had disappeared over the ridge. “Yes,” John says, “I thin the world is safe enough that we might stay with you a while.” 


End file.
